BENGALURU, India — Despite two weeks of UN-sponsored talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the participating 197 countries failed Saturday to agree on a plan to tackle global droughts, which have become longer and more severe due to a warming climate .
The biennial talks, known as COP 16 and hosted by a UN body dedicated to combating desertification and droughts, sought to create strong global mandates to legally bind and oblige countries to fund early warning systems and build resilient infrastructure to build in poorer countries, especially Africa. most affected by the changes.
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification has been released a report warned earlier this week that if global warming trends continue, nearly five billion people – including in most of Europe, parts of the western US, Brazil, East Asia and Central Africa – will be affected by the drying of the Earth’s surface by the end of the year. century, compared to a quarter of the current world population. The report also states that agriculture is particularly at risk, which could lead to food insecurity for communities around the world.
This is the fourth time that UN talks have aimed to get countries to make more progress in tackling the problems loss of biodiversity, climate change And plastic pollution have either failed to reach consensus this year or delivered disappointing results, worrying many countries, especially the most vulnerable.
The countries participating in the discussions in Riyadh decided to shift the path to the 2026 talks hosted by Mongolia.
“Parties need more time to reach an agreement on the best way to tackle the critical problem of drought,” Ibrahim Thiaw, the head of the UNCCD, said at the end of the talks in Riyadh.
Thiaw said the conference was “like no other” in the 30-year history of the talks. “We have elevated the land and drought agenda above sector-specific discussions and made it a cornerstone of global efforts to tackle interconnected challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, migration and global security.”
Long-term solutions to drought – such as curbing climate change – were not a topic of discussion.
Host country Saudi Arabia has been criticized in the past for slowing progress on cutting fossil fuel emissions in other negotiations. The Gulf state is one of the world’s largest oil producers and exporters, with the world’s second largest oil reserves.
Earlier in the conference, host country Saudi Arabia, a few other countries and international banks pledged $2.15 billion for drought resilience. And the Arab Coordination Group, made up of 10 development banks based in the Middle East, has pledged $10 billion by 2030 to tackle land degradation, desertification and drought. The funds are expected to help 80 of the most vulnerable countries prepare for worsening drought conditions.
But the UN estimates that droughts will cost $125 billion worldwide between 2007 and 2017.
Erika Gomez, chief negotiator from Panama, said that while no decision was made on tackling the drought, significant progress was being made on other key issues.
“We have achieved several important milestones, especially in growing civil society involvement and gender equality,” Gomez said. “Until the end, the parties could not agree on whether or not the new drought response instrument should be legally binding or not,” said Jes Weigelt of European climate think tank TMG Research, who is monitoring the talks.
“I fear that the UNCCD COP 16 has suffered the same fate as this year’s biodiversity and climate COPs. It didn’t work out,” he said.
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